Research links quiet phonemes to cold places, while in warm regions the language is louder.
A new study establishes a connection between climate and language development, indicating that environmental temperatures influence the loudness of some phonemes. According to research, this is why languages tend to sound louder in tropical countries, while people communicate more quietly in cold places, according to the scientific journal PNAS Nexus.
“Simply speaking, the languages in warmer regions are louder than those in colder regions“, says linguist Soren Wichmann of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. He is one of the authors of the study, together with three colleagues from Nankai University in Tianjin, China.
The physical properties of air influence how a language is spoken or heard
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The vocal cords vibrate less in the cold
The effect can be explained this way: Speech sounds are transmitted through the air in the form of sound waves. The physical properties of air therefore influence the ease with which speech can be produced or heard.
Voiceless phonemes such as “p”, “t” and “s” are produced without vibration of the vocal folds. Voiced phonemes, such as “b”, “d” and “z”, however, are created by vibrations of the vocal cords.
To the dry and cold air, the vocal cords tend to dry out and have more difficulty producing the vibration necessary for sound phonemes. To the hot airyet the high-frequency energy of voiceless phonemes is absorbed more strongly because the molecules vibrate faster in warm air. This makes the sound muffled or less clear.
Nearly 5,300 languages analyzed
To determine the loudness of a phoneme, the researchers used a scale from 1 for voiceless phonemes to 17 for open vowels, such as A. Using this methodology, a total of 5,293 languages were analyzed, whose basic vocabulary is registered in the Automated Likely Judgment Program database. , were classified as loud or quiet.
You the languages were then compared with the average temperature data of their respective places of origin. The researchers then discovered a clear statistical link: According to the journal Nature, the average volume is louder around the Equator, so these languages are louder.
The vowel-consonant relationship influences loudness
How strong or weak a language is also depends on the relationship between vowels and consonants. The Salishe languages in the Pacific Northwest, i.e. on the northwestern coast of North America, are considered particularly “quiet”. Words often have no vowels: “płt” means “often” and “pk’m” means mosquito.
On the other hand, the languages spoken in the tropics tend to have a balanced ratio of vowels to consonants: Consonants and vowels often alternate in words. For example, “wehewehe” means “to explain” in Hawaiian and “edo okuta” means “stone”.
According to the study, the languages of Oceania and West Africa sound particularly “loud”. For example, butterfly in Yoruba, a language spoken in southwestern Nigeria, is “labalábá”.
Clear, there are some exceptions: In some regions of Central America and mainland Southeast Asia there are quieter sounding languages, despite the warm climate that prevails there.
Slow development
According to Wichmann, these exceptions prove it The effects of temperature on volume develop only slowly and they shape the sounds of a language over centuries or even millennia.
According to the authors of the study, there is a lot of evidence that the the environment can shape language. “For a long time researchers believed that linguistic structures were a closed system, not influenced in any way by the social or natural environment. More recent studies, including ours, are starting to question this idea,” explains Wichmann.
This content is a work originally published by the German agency DW. The opinion expressed by the publication does not reflect or represent the opinion of this portal or its collaborators.
Source: Terra
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